"The air tastes like copper and old pennies," Odette rasped, her back pressed hard against the freezing titanium of the bulkhead."That means the filters are officially dead," Felix muttered, his fingers clawing blindly at the dark, frost-rimed junction box. "Just breathe shallow. Don't waste the oxygen.""Don't tell me how to breathe, Felix. I’ve been surviving this garbage scow longer than you’ve had hair on your chin.""Right. And how’s that survival strategy working out for us right now? We’re blind, we’re deaf, and we’re drifting through a graveyard of space rocks with forty percent hull integrity.""It’s thirty-eight percent," Odette corrected him coldly, her voice echoing in the absolute blackness of the unlit crawlspace. "The starboard stabilizer sheared off ten minutes ago. Didn’t you feel the shudder?""I felt it," Felix snapped, his wrench slipping with a sharp clink against a live cable. "I also felt my last meal trying to crawl back up my throat, but I didn't stop to writ

"They're at the secondary airlock," Odette hissed, shoving Felix behind the buckled frame of the dead console. Her pulse pistol was raised, the blue charging light casting sharp angles across her gaunt, sweat-streaked cheekbones. "That’s sixty meters of corridor. We have less than twenty seconds before they breach."Felix scrambled on his knees, his boots slipping on the slick frost coating the deck plates. "The seals on this bulkhead are warped. If they drop a thermal lance, the whole compartment decompresses.""Then we don't wait for them to drop it." Odette grabbed his jacket collar, hauling him upright with a strength born entirely of pure, unadulterated terror. "We run for the escape pods.""The pods are on the port side!" Felix shouted over the rising shriek of the ship's automated warning klaxons, which had finally jerked back to life. "We have to cross the central junction—it's completely exposed to their approach vector!""Do you want to stand here and wait to be court-martia

"The trajectory is decaying," Felix announced, his voice flat and devoid of any remaining panic. He stared at the primary navigation display, which was little more than a jagged, flickering line of green code bleeding across a cracked monitor. "We’ve been caught in the outer pull of a gas giant."Odette dropped onto the co-pilot’s seat, her hands instantly flying over the dead controls before she caught herself. She let out a harsh, bitter laugh. "A gas giant? Wonderful. Are we talking about a gentle slingshot, or are we going to be compressed into a diamond before we even cross the thermosphere?""That depends entirely on whether we have enough power to correct our angle of entry," Felix replied, turning his head slowly to look at her. His eyes were sunken, dark-rimmed hollows in a face caked with dried sweat and metallic dust. "Which we don't.""Then why are we even looking at the monitors?" Odette snapped, leaning her head back against the freezing headrest. "Just let it pull us do

"A controlled bleed," Odette repeated, the words tasting like ash and old copper in her dry mouth. She stared at him, her eyes wide, unblinking in the sickly green wash of the dying console. "There is no such thing as a controlled bleed with a drive this degraded, Felix. You’re talking about hooking our nervous systems directly into a dying star.""Do you have a better idea?" Felix demanded, his fingers already stripping the heavy rubber casing off the primary data trunk. Inside, a bundle of fiber-optic filaments pulsed with erratic, violet light—the physical manifestation of the ship's lingering, malevolent ghost. "Because right now, that gas giant down there is pulling us in with enough force to turn this entire hull into a flattened pancake in less than eight minutes."Odette stood up, her boots slamming hard against the buckled deck plates. "That core isn't just a battery, Felix. It’s a synaptic sponge. It remembers everything—every jump, every failure, every dead crew member whos

The heavy magnetic seal of the docking clamp slammed home with a deep, bone-rattling thud that resonated straight through the deck plates of the Pelican.Odette didn't breathe. Her hand hovered inches from the secondary console, fingers trembling against the grease and frost of the emergency terminal."They didn't wait for our registry," Odette whispered, her voice a sharp, brittle hiss that cut through the low, dying hum of the ship's environmental control. "Commercial vessels don't carry boarding tech that heavy. Not standard haulers."Felix stared at the primary airlock status monitor, his eyes bloodshot and wide in the flashing red pulse of the emergency strobes. The secondary sector indicator was blinking a harsh, unforgiving amber. Pressure equalizing."It's not a rescue," Felix said, his voice dropping into a flat, dead register as the reality of their situation clawed past the adrenaline. "It’s an orbital reclamation crew. Or worse.""We don't have weapons," Odette snapped, he